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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27089842">Dresses, or Lack Thereof</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/BDBriggs/pseuds/BDBriggs'>BDBriggs</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Briggs the Seeker [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>World of Warcraft</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(all minor but there), Blood, Divorce, Domestic Violence, F/M, I FEEL LIKE THAT NEEDS TO BE SAID, Suggestive Themes, THE VIOLENCE AND WHATNOT ISN'T BETWEEN HER AND VARIAN, Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-09 03:01:46</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,994</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27089842</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/BDBriggs/pseuds/BDBriggs</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Briggs does not care for dresses. </p>
<p>She wears combat leathers, her long cloaks the only things swirling about her ankles. The fact that she wears clothes more typical of what men wear stops being something she pays attention to. At least, until she starts dating a King.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>(past), Original Female Character / Original Male Character, Varian Wrynn/Original Female Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>Briggs the Seeker [6]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1242878</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Dresses, or Lack Thereof</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Obligatory apology for anyone who follows me for AH content. I'm finally getting around to writing out some of the more gritty parts of Briggs' backstory. This character means the world to me and you bet your ass I'm going to post stuff about her. </p>
<p>NOTE: there are descriptions of domestic violence. It's not graphic, but it is there. Mind the tags.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Briggs does not care for dresses.</p>
<p>She used to have a fondness for them when she was little. Every winter’s veil, her parents would take her and her siblings to the tailor to get nice clothing for the celebrations, and Briggs loved the swirly skirts and soft fabrics and pretty buttons. She and her sister would dance together, spinning and stumbling and twirling. Every year they put on an impromptu show for the patrons and visiting family, giggling and laughing and tripping over each other. One year, Briggs remembers, she had a velvet dress. It was so soft she kept running her hands across it, reveling in the feel of it. It was deep green, and it had sequins on the bodice in the shapes of flowers.</p>
<p>Briggs outgrew dresses long before she left to train with the Silver Hand. As a young teenager, she took odd jobs in the village and surrounding farms, and she was not afraid to work with the boys and get her hands dirty. She farmed, she fished, she helped build new structures, she repaired roofs, and she took care of horses. Dresses became inconvenient and impractical, so she nicked clothes from her older brothers’ wardrobes. They were too large and horrifically baggy on her slender frame, but it was better than ripping her skirts or accidently flashing whoever was with her at the time. After a few weeks of pilfering her brothers’ clothes, her mother marched her to the tailor to fit her for several sets of work clothes, shirts and pants, just like what her brothers wore but in her smaller size.</p>
<p>And if she was ever mocked by the boys for wearing men’s clothes? Well, a few well-timed punches and some scraped knuckles took care of that. Stern words or the cold shoulder never worked on bullies, anyhow.</p>
<p>Besides, her tendency to wear men’s clothes didn’t matter once she left to train as a paladin under the Silver Hand. No combat recruit would wear a dress, man or woman, and that suited Briggs just fine. The odds of her returning home for anything other than holidays were slim, so Briggs didn’t much care about the judging stares of the people back home. She grew to be more at home in pants than skirts, and nobody thought twice about it.</p>
<p>The next time Briggs wore a dress, she had to borrow one of her sister’s because none of her own fit her anymore. She didn’t think much on it at the time—Prince Arthas had come to her little town, to her parents’ inn, and they expected business. She and her sister danced together in the kitchen, swirling their skirts and tripping over each other’s feet in the small space, just like old times. But then Arthas and his knights purged the town because of the plague, slaughtering families in the streets. Briggs fled into the hills with nothing but her sister’s dress and the knife she’d been using to cut the roast.</p>
<p>She made it out on the other side with only a handful of scrapes and bruises. The dress did not fare so well </p>
<p>So Briggs does not wear dresses. After fighting for her life in a slim dress with little range of movement, she can’t stand the things. Anything but the lightest skirts feels like a cage. The people near Stormwind are less judgmental about her wardrobe, thankfully, although she gets a number of raised eyebrows. She takes odd jobs again, cooking, cleaning, taking care of horses, farming, or mending roofs. She can play darts better than anyone at the local inn, can drink the men under the table, and throws a vicious punch. She gets a reputation for it and people learn to stop messing with her, so she throws punches less and less often. Reputations, however, only carry so far.</p>
<p>Connor is charming. He’s only three years older than her twenty-two, and he doesn’t try to outdo her like all the other men. He sweet talks her into going home with him several times, and before she knows it, she is pregnant. Their wedding is a simple thing done in the cathedral—Briggs might not be religious anymore, but Connor is, and he asks her to marry him under the arches of the cathedral. She caves. He buys her a pretty white dress for the occasion, along with white roses and simple white slippers. They can just barely afford it all, along with his pretty black suit and the red rose tucked into his lapel, but they manage, and Briggs marvels at it all. Somehow, she’s managed to score herself a perfect, ideal wedding, aside from the fact that she’s with child.</p>
<p>They manage to hide her baby bump from the priest, too, wonder of wonders.</p>
<p>Caspian is born, and then Stephania two years later, and Briggs never touches a dress again. She <em>does</em> stay at home with the children instead of working her multitude of odd jobs, however, and the lack of money hurts more than she could have imagined. She tries her hand at sewing, just for something to sell at the market, but all she manages are pricked thumbs and horrifically lopsided clothes. Connor laughs at her failures, and Briggs wishes she could punch the smarmy smirk off his face like she would with the boys back home, or with the drunks at the inn. She gives him the cold shoulder instead, because married couples shouldn’t hit each other.</p>
<p>Three-year-old Caspian is a menace. Two-year-old Caspian had been a doll in comparison, waddling about the house to bring her water when morning sickness got the best of her, or bringing her bread when she felt too sick and exhausted to move with the weight of a baby inside her. Briggs knows now that her second pregnancy was not a normal or healthy one, but at the time, she could only think of how useless she was to Connor. She ate all his food, used all his money, and she couldn’t even summon the strength to cook or clean for him. Little Caspian helps wherever he can, and snuggles with her to keep her warm, and he’s a wonderful little human being, even at his young age.</p>
<p>Stephania is born healthy, if small, and Briggs starts feeling better. And Caspian starts being a terror. He <em>climbs</em>, oh, does he climb. Up the brick walls of their home, up onto the counter, onto the table <em>full of food</em>, even up onto the roof on one particularly memorable occasion. Briggs feels frazzled at home alone with one infant and one toddling menace. Connor gets frustrated with her inability to keep track of a conversation when she’s <em>pulling Caspian off the wall, thank you very much</em>, and with her failure on many occasions to have food cooked by the time he gets home.</p>
<p>Briggs counts his earnings one night and is horrified to find them short of their next payment to the landlord. It’s the least Connor has ever earned. Stressed beyond all belief, she asks him what happened, why his earnings are so low, and Connor takes it as a personal offense. Briggs listens as he tells her how, exhausted and hungry after guard duty, Connor decided to start eating at the inn on the way home every day. Their precious little money was spent on expensive food because she couldn’t pull herself together long enough to make dinner.</p>
<p>Connor’s words, not hers.</p>
<p>Caspian takes the lull in the conversation to climb up on the table. Rather, he throws himself bodily upwards at it, grasping for a handhold and finding the folded cloth under Briggs’ pot of stew. The stew weighs considerably less than Caspian, and Briggs watches in horror as he and the pot slide off the table. Caspian falls to the floor with an audible <em>whump</em>, right next to his father, the pot tumbles across the floor with a horrible series of crashes, and the stew coats everyone and everything around them.</p>
<p>The smack that follows will forever be burned into Briggs’ memory, along with the strangled scream Caspian let out as he clutched at his reddening cheek.</p>
<p>Briggs doesn’t even think. Married couples aren’t supposed to hit each other, no, but parents aren’t supposed to hit their children, either. She nails Connor in the nose, breaking it with an awful crunch. While he retreats a few steps, clutching his bleeding nose, Briggs shoves Stephania, who had been napping in her sling, into Caspian’s arms and tells him to take her to their bedroom and not leave until she comes to get them. She stands between Connor and the bedrooms, hands clenched into fists at her sides, and waits for him to make the next move.</p>
<p>Connor is livid, and larger than her. Briggs just had a baby a few months ago and hasn’t thrown a punch in years. She does not win the ensuing fistfight.</p>
<p>Briggs wakes hours later to Caspian shaking her awake, asking for another napkin for Stephania. He seems uncaring that she’s sprawled in the wreckage of their table, chairs and dishes shattered all around her, although he wipes the blood from her nose and split lip with his sleeve. Connor is nowhere to be found.</p>
<p>She takes both children to the cathedral in the morning, once they’ve all taken a bath and freshened up. She marches up to the priest who married her and Connor, shows him the bruises on her and her son’s faces, and demands a divorce. He grants it without question.</p>
<p>They don’t go back to the home they shared with Connor. Briggs finds Jane, the midwife who helped her birth her children, and asks for refuge while she finds a job. Jane offers her an apprenticeship and a place to stay. Briggs would be insane not to take the opportunity. It is there that she learns how to mix potions and elixirs, as well as how to grow and pick healing herbs.</p>
<p>Briggs returns to her habit of taking a multitude of odd jobs, hoarding money so she can afford her own home with space for the children. It comes in handy when, a few years later, Caspian falls dangerously ill. She spends every bit of her hard-earned coin on medicine, as well as to pay for healers to help him. She racks up debt for the first time in her life, uncaring about what she’ll have to do to get out of it. If she can save her son’s life, it will be worth it.</p>
<p>Caspian slowly returns to health after several years of being bedridden for weeks at a time. Briggs returns to her odd jobs, although she dreads leaving him at home alone. Steph is old enough to keep an eye on him, though, and Jane takes them with her whenever Briggs must be away for longer than a few hours. The priests at Northshire Abbey, familiar with her from the amount of time she spent at the Abbey with Caspian while they attempted to improve his health, ask her for help when the wildlife and Defias start picking off farmers. So Briggs buys a couple of old knives and uses them to give the priests a little breathing room. She takes another similar job from the guards, and then another from a courier, and then another from the innkeeper…</p>
<p>Well. Briggs ends up getting rich and famous from her bloody work. She couldn’t give a damn about the fame, but the money is nice. Money means she can afford her rent and pay off her debt. Money means she can pay Jane to look after the kids, means she can buy them real gifts on their birthdays, means she can take them to a tailor to get fitted for nice clothes and work outfits.</p>
<p>Stephania gives the tailor a dirty look when she asks her what kind of fabric she wants for her new dress. Briggs chastises her for being rude at an innocent question, but firmly tells the tailor she wants a shirt and pants. And if she takes the kids for ice cream after their fitting, well, that’s between her and the kids.</p>
<p>Not that Caspian sees past it. The little bugger is too smart for his own good.</p>
<p>One of Briggs’ guildmates buys her a dress for Lunar New Year. <em>Technically</em> it’s a robe, and men wear them for the celebration, too, which is the only reason she caves in and wears it to the fireworks show in Moonglade. It’s a long thing, down to her ankles, the fabric a pretty leaf-green with darker swirls embroidered into it. Her guildmates tell her how pretty she is in it, that she should wear dresses more often. She laughs it off and tells them, <em>you can’t fight in a dress, trust me</em>, and that’s that.</p>
<p>She keeps the dress, though, keeps it in the back of her closet where the moths hopefully won’t find it. It really is a pretty thing.</p>
<p>Dresses never really enter her conscious thoughts after that. She wears combat leathers, her long cloaks the only things swirling about her ankles. It stops being something she pays attention to. At least, until she starts dating a <em>King</em>.</p>
<p>Varian has never been one to stand on ceremony, not as long as she’s known him. He scowls and grumbles when his advisors tell him the <em>proper</em> way to do things, he eats his meals with only one kind of fork, and he doesn’t doll himself up in the finest garments he can find. He doesn’t mind getting covered in dirt or dust on horseback, and wears clothing suitable to whatever task is at hand. If he’s in battle, he wears his heavy armor. If he’s riding, he has sturdy riding pants and boots, as well as a cotton shirt. If he’s in the castle, he has soft and comfortable clothing that won’t offend the nobles, but also doesn’t reek of opulence.</p>
<p>And apparently, he has clothes for when he sleeps, too.</p>
<p>The first time they spend the night together, they’re too exhausted to do anything even remotely fun. Both of them spent the last several days in Northrend fighting the scourge and Arthas’ death knights. Briggs has a long cut on her thigh, and Varian has a set of claw marks running along his side from a geist. Varian shows her to his washroom to clean up before taking a bucket and soap for himself. Briggs hears him pull his dressing screen along the floor for privacy.</p>
<p>She washes herself quickly and thoroughly with the water and soap he set out for her. The soap smells vaguely perfumed, she notes with some amusement. She emerges from the washroom to find Varian is still behind the screen.</p>
<p>“I’m almost done,” he says. “Go ahead and climb into bed.”</p>
<p>Briggs strips down to her bra and panties, throwing her shirt and pants vaguely in the direction of her backpack. Then she strips out of her underclothes, too, realizing they’re still soaked in sweat. She hadn’t planned on spending the night in the castle when she packed, and she doesn’t have a nightshirt that isn’t dirty from her weeks in Northrend. She’ll just have to go without.</p>
<p>She settles down on the side of the bed that has an empty nightstand, on the far side of the room from where Varian is behind the screen. Her hair is damp from the water, and she’d hate to have horrific bed-head in the morning, so she sits down on the bed and sets to braiding her hair. It’s long enough to be a chore, although it’ll save her the pain of untangling it in the morning, and she’s not quite done by the time Varian emerges from behind the screen.</p>
<p>“Sorry I took so long,” he says from behind her, “I needed to…um.” He stammers a bit, trailing off, voice fading into nothing.</p>
<p>“You needed to <em>um?”</em> Briggs asks, a habit left over from encouraging her children to speak clearly. “I haven’t heard of this <em>um.</em>”</p>
<p>Varian goes quiet behind her. “You’re…not wearing anything?” He says at last, voice pitched high in his confusion.</p>
<p>Briggs ties off her braid and looks at him over her shoulder. “Very observant,” she says. “I don’t have any clean nightshirts. The ones I packed are dirty from the last few weeks on the road.”</p>
<p>Varian, amusingly, casts his gaze up at the ceiling to avoid looking at her. “I—you could have asked for one,” he says. His cheeks are red. He’s wearing a long shirt and loose pants that must be the fashionable nightclothes that Briggs never paid attention to when she visited the tailors.</p>
<p>“You’re blushing!” She observes, laughing lightly. “Goodness, Varian, you have a son. Surely, you’ve seen a woman naked before.”</p>
<p>Varian heaves a heavy sigh. “Tiffin wore a nightgown most nights,” he grumbles. “You really won’t wear one?”</p>
<p>“Nope,” Briggs says, swinging her legs up onto the bed and pulling the blankets up to her hips. “I don’t wear dresses. Besides, you’ll appreciate it in the morning when we’re rested enough to have fun.”</p>
<p>The blush on his cheeks gets brighter, if possible. “By the Light,” he mutters, taking his shirt off and joining her in the bed in only his pants. “You’re going to be the death of me.”</p>
<p>Briggs snuggles close to him, humming when he wraps his arms around her. He’s warm, and the contact of his skin on hers is enough to make heat simmer low in her stomach, even if she’s too exhausted to act on it. She presses a kiss to his cheek. She just doesn’t wear dresses. If she did, she wouldn’t be able to revel in the feeling of his warm skin against her back. Besides, she thinks, smiling a little. He’ll appreciate her lack of clothes in the morning when they’re rested enough to take advantage of it.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you so much for reading. I know OC content isn't the most popular. I cannot express how much it means to me that you actually read this far &lt;3</p></blockquote></div></div>
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